Writing will save you. It always does.

A new year's ramble about why I write.

(writing pieces are really hard to illustrate so here are my animals)

When I started my Substack account this summer, I vowed it would only be about writing. I love talking about writing, and there is always a ready audience of people who also want to write, and, also, who want to be published. I love to talk about the craft, the tips and tricks, the ways to anchor or restructure your thoughts, your identity even, to make those things more achievable. It’s been lovely connecting with readers here, especially as I’m no longer on twitter or facebook.

I’m at home right now on New Years’ Eve, fighting off a cold and with my plans in tatters. Half of me is disappointed; half of me is thinking: ooh, time to write. It’s not just that as someone who has combined working and parenthood for more than 25 years, an unexpected window of empty hours always feels like an opportunity. It’s also that when my mood is low, there is one thing guaranteed to level me out again; and (in the absence of my nearest and dearest) it’s not drugs, alcohol or high quality chocolate: it’s putting words on a page.

If you are a writer, published or unpublished, you process the world by writing. This has applied to me throughout my life – long before I had my name on a spine - and it applies to friends who are writers too. A dear friend is currently battling a life-threatening illness; as soon as she was able, she wrote about it. Of course she did. When my youngest was facing a serious surgery, I wrote a book where a child ‘died’ and was resurrected (turns out the child had never died at all. Yes, I know this sounds ridiculous, you really have to read the story). It took me years to acknowledge that I had been basically processing my fears by laying out the worst possible scenario and then giving it a happy ending.

Almost twenty years ago, when I skidded on diesel one morning and rolled my car into a ditch at 50mph, my thoughts, even as I flew upside down in the air were ‘oh wow, so this is what it actually feels like to roll a car.’ I wrote it all out that evening – the exploding glass, the smoking airbags, the weirdly gloomy police officer - so that I wouldn’t forget. I’m sure it’s a good part of the reason I was able to start driving again not long after.

Cavemen and women, those early storytellers, drew pictures on the wall to show that yes, there were bears and terrible creatures outside, but also that they had survived them. Or perhaps they were processing what had happened; a kind of Paleolithic what the f*** was that giant hairy thing. We tell stories to reassure ourselves that bad things can happen and that we can prevail. We tell them to keep a record – yes, this thing really did happen. And sometimes we write just to give our minds something to do, to take a tangled web of thoughts and straighten them out so that we can face the world again. Journalling - the more personalised version of this - is now an accepted part of the therapeutic process. Get the words and thoughts out, and somehow what’s in your head will arrange itself a little better; like a neurological version of Stacy Solomon’s Sort Your Life Out. Pile those ancient resentments and unmet needs high, like a load of dated T-shirts and unwatched DVDs!

I wrote a piece on here a few months ago about how little I enjoyed talking about myself, especially the kind of personal things that were inveigled out of female authors in order to sell books. I vowed to keep any promotion firmly on the craft side of things. Well, I’ve failed magnificently so far. Even as a fiction writer it is, it turns out, impossible to separate what I write from who I am. Try answering variations of: “Your main character is a divorced single mother. You must be aware that people will think it is based on you” without saying a single thing about yourself. I did tell one journalist that I was disappointed she assumed my character was anything like me, given I literally make stuff up for a living, and the interview never really recovered. It was as if I had broken the rules of an unspoken game, simply by not being 100 per cent accommodating. On the upside, I don’t speak her native language so I guess I will never have to know what that newspaper said about me.

But I was reminded of the saying that you hear around Hollywood: you don’t get paid for the acting, you get paid to do the promotion. I may not love the talking but by God I love the writing. Either way, it turns out I am the writing. Or maybe the writing is me.

I’m some way into writing my new novel now, and while some books of mine have been tricky, reluctant to find their shape or give up their secrets, this one is – while there is a lot to iron out – a lot of fun. I have a premise which I love returning to, and characters that felt three dimensional from the start, so sitting down with it most days feels like a joy. I arrange myself at my desk, and even if I only manage to go over what I did the day before, polishing and honing, I feel … better. In the months that I am not writing, I have found over the years that something disconcerting happens after just a few weeks: the nearest thing I can describe it to is a feeling of being untethered, of floating around in a way that feels less like freedom and more like being, well, lost. Writing tethers me. I’m pretty sure my kids would say I was a nicer parent when I was writing; even with what Esther Perel would call the ambiguous loss of having a mother whose brain was 25 per cent still stuck in a plot line somewhere.

Sometimes I appall colleagues by telling them I’ll be taking my laptop on holiday. “You’ve got to give your brain a rest! You need to relax!” What if it’s lost in the pages of my book that my neural pathways do what they need to do? Every writer knows that blissful flow state, when you are so lost in your story that whole hours go by without you even noticing. Athletes experience the same phenomenon. Aside from meditation (which I suck at) what could be better for you?

I remember being on holiday in the US a few years ago and my happiest time every day was from 5am when, jetlagged, I would sneak down to the kitchen, make a pot of coffee and get lost in the book that became The Giver of Stars. It’s not that I didn’t love being with my family, just that those few hours on my own in my story were what set my brain to Fair and meant that when I closed my laptop again and put on my running shoes to go get everybody’s breakfast, I was completely happy to join the non-imaginary world again. When I’ve been at my unhappiest, losing myself in a world that was entirely three dimensional in my imagination has felt like taking a little holiday, a brief respite from the far more complicated demands of the real world.

I once asked Jonny Geller, the CEO of my agents, Curtis Brown, what he thought writers had in common. “They have to write,” he said. “It’s not a choice.” Reader, I felt more than seen. I felt validated. Many years ago I won a bursary from The Independent Newspaper to train as a journalist. I recently found my successful 1992 application in which I said that I saw being a journalist like being a really tenacious terrier, unable to let go until the story was written. I still feel a bit like that as a fiction writer; I’m still fixated on that ball, still never quite letting go. This isn’t workaholism – believe me, I know to my cost the difference – but an absolute love of the immersion, of the creation, the possibility of story. It’s about gaining understanding through the act of doing. Connection with readers is an added bonus. But this is where I really feel the privilege in getting what I love to do for a living.

So here’s to you, all you writers out there, from those seeking the courage to start, to those who are wrestling the last few paragraphs to the ground. Here’s to you creating whole new worlds or dredging up the distant details of one you have already lived. Some of you will be published, and some of you may be content with having created a story on a page and have it at least vaguely resemble the (usually far superior) one in your head. Only you can know how necessary it is to you to do this.

Wherever you fall on the scale, I wish you absolute joy and satisfaction in doing it this coming year. And thank you for reading x